During the winter of 2000-2001 we were not able to do any hill walking. But we vowed that this would change for 20001-2002; and it has.

In early January 2002 we set out for our first real bit of hill walking in Spain. We had purchased Guy Hunter-Watts Walking in Andalucia and this was our first opportunity to do one of his walks. This book lists walks in each of Southern Spain’s Natural Parks. We opted for a walk in La Axarquia - a park about 30 kilometers east of Malaga. Our walk that took us from Competa to Archez and Canillas before we returned to our starting point in Competa. This walk covered approximately 9 kilometers and took about 4 hours. One of the reasons we chose this walk was that it was rated as being easy/medium. We do not want to experience difficult!

Admittedly we did have a problem with the directions which caused us to hike up a mountainside before we realized that we were supposed to be on the mountainside on the other side of the river, but this walk did cover a tremendous amount of up and down. Mostly down at the start and then the middle third is almost exclusively up. The remaining third is relatively flat except for the last bit when you enter the village of Competa. At left is a view of Competa, our starting and ending town.

As you can see form the above picture, the area is quite hilly. So to get to the next town, we headed down the back side of Competa, to Archez, which lies at the bottom of the next valley. Now, once at the bottom, we crossed the stream several times (thank goodness it hadn’t rained more than it has lately!), then headed back up to the top of the next hill so that we could hike back down to the river again to climb up to the third town on our itinerary, Canillas de Albaida, pictured at right. Just walking through the town was itself quite a challenge as the streets are rather vertical.

Given the amount of altitude change involved with this walk we shudder to think what the walks in this book that are rated difficult must be like.

By chance, we stumbled upon a lovely area near Ojen, just inland from Marbella. There is a natural preserve area open to day hikers that offers both easy, open walks as well as straight-up-the-hill challenges. We chose the former (see picture at left) and spent a couple of hours wandering about. Some areas have sign posts, but not all the trails are easy to discern. One in particular was clearly marked off the main road, then just seemed to dwindle down to nothing in 40 meters. So a GPS would be quite helpful here if you want a chance of finding your way back. There is a hotel near the trail heads that sells a map of the walks (although the designations on the map don’t have any correspondence to the markers on the trails). The hotel also had a great looking restaurant that seemed to be doing a brisk business with the local Spaniards. Maybe next time...

The easiest is to drive up the rough dirt road and park your vehicle at the trail head, then head out on foot to the overlook toward Marbella. You will know you are there when you see the statue of the ram up on the crag (picture above, right). From here on a clear day you can see Marbella. Unfortunately the day we were there, it wasn’t so clear, as you can see from the picture of Verna at the overlook (at left). There is a trail that follows the valley in the left part of the picture that will take you all the way to Marbella in a couple of hours.

The other place we tried was Sierra de Benalmadena, which gives the walker a choice as to how much climbing he/she wants to do. These are the hills above Benalmadena and there is a cable car that takes you to the top, if you prefer. So you can walk up and back (which we did), or ride up and walk back. Once at the top, there is a short climb to the actual summit, from where you can get commanding views of the coast on a clear day. The day we ascended, it was bright and clear on the way up but after about a half hour, the clouds rolled in and our views were obscurred. We were able to get this view of distant Fuengirola (right) before our view was lost.

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